Good boy
Sentences to get depressed about:
The Great Multitasking Panic of the Late Oughts ended, like all panics, not because we found a solution, but because we just…stopped panicking. […] Most of our fears ended up being right, but by then we weren’t afraid. Grandma got an iPad, and it was game over.
From Adam Mastroianni, excellent as always.
This is explained, sort of, by her being descended from Serbian cat people. At one point in the movie a very catlike woman addresses her, in Serbian, as moja sestra — “my sister.”
I am always on the lookout for an unexpected mention of my people, and Alan Jacobs delivered.
I always thought it was good news when an RSS feed on my “Paused and Defunct” list woke up, but it looks like sometimes these feeds wake up as zombies. The latest one is Thought Catalog which I followed for the occasional post from Ryan Holiday but is now dead as a website and posting random articles like this on its feed.
Fortunately Ryan Holiday still has a blog, doing his part to prevent the web from becoming auto-generated slop.
Anyone interested in the writings of Nassim Taleb will enjoy this crash course on the Incerto from John Goodman.
Good boy
Earlier this year I mentioned the anonymous X account Crémieux as a proponent of the concept of “National IQ”. Now we know the person behind that account, and the truth is in fact quite boring. This is the line between having a pseudonym and creating a sock puppet. (↬Sasha Gusev)
As I pass the Microsoft Authenticator matryoshka doll gauntlet of one number matching push notification after another, the immortal words of Arthur C. Clarke come to mind: Any sufficiently thoughtless technology is indistinguishable from torture.
📚 Finished reading: Feline Philosophy by John Gray promised cats, delivered a brief review of old philosophers. This is a book that could have been a listicle, and a forgettable one at that.
Weekend mood (taken yesterday at the Norfolk Zoo)
Today’s FT essay on the rise of the anti-vaccine movement was a miss. Instead of asking why so many people lost trust in institutions it goes straight to politics: 10 paragraphs on Germany’s AfD, no mention of whether some of the people’s concerns were valid. With that, the movement can only grow.